Engineering Manager, Architecture Engineering: Async - GitLab

An overview of this role

As Engineering Manager, Architecture Engineering: Async, you'll lead a distributed group of Site Reliability Engineers and Backend Engineers. You'll support their development and balance production reliability with platform projects, including zero-downtime Redis upgrades, support for single-tenant and cell-based deployments, and the move from queue-based job orchestration to a durable workflow engine.

What you'll do

• Lead, hire, and grow a team of site reliability engineers and backend engineers, supporting career development, promotions, and onboarding.
• Own reliability for the job processing and caching platforms, including service-level objectives, error budgets, alerting, and weekly operational reviews.
• Manage capacity planning, support escalations, and incident follow-ups, balancing operational work with roadmap projects and rescoping work when deadlines can't be met.
• Run the team's part of GitLab.com's first-tier on-call rotation, including shift coverage, onboarding, and handovers, and serve as incident commander for high-severity incidents.
• Drive zero-downtime Redis version upgrades and automate operating system patching and reboots.
• Adapt job processing to run in single-tenant and cell-based deployments.
• Own the migration from queue-based job orchestration to a durable workflow engine, defining the first use cases, a measurable migration path, and the roadmap.
• Own quarterly planning and the team roadmap, and clarify shared operational responsibilities with partner teams, including Git storage.

What you'll bring

• Experience managing an engineering team delivering high-performance services at scale, ideally site reliability engineers or infrastructure engineers running production software as a service systems.
• Technical depth in background job processing and caching technologies such as Redis and Sidekiq, sufficient to guide decisions about upgrades, capacity, and failure modes.
• Experience managing reliability against service-level objectives, including defining service-level indicators, setting up burn-rate alerting, and planning capacity.
• Experience running a 24/7 on-call rotation and coordinating high-severity incidents.
• A track record of balancing operational work and incident follow-ups with roadmap projects, and pushing back on scope when deadlines can't be met.
• Experience leading a fully remote team across time zones.